Is This a Reason My Site Is Not Getting Indexed?

[sashas]

I just checked out the HTML code for one of my websites (running on Wordpress), and I found a TON of gibberish code.

Check out these screenshots below:

1. A screenshot of the "visual" view of the editor on my Wordpress blog. Everything looks fine and normal.

http://img17.imageshack.us/i/visualg.png/


2. Then turn to the HTML view of the article. Notice the horrendous code:

http://img17.imageshack.us/i/html1z.png/


Now this website has got no pages indexed in Google (site:xyz.com) - although Google Webmaster tools say that 15 pages have been indexed - and Yahoo site explorer shows just one page indexed and 114 backlinks. The site has been live for just about a month now. I built it slowly (its less than 20 pages anyway), never built the backlinks in a rushed manner, and I was very curious for a very long time why this site wasn't getting up in Google rankings since my target niche has very low competition.

Then I stumble upon the horrendous code. And I noticed that a lot of my other sites that aren't ranking well or have disappeared from the rankings overnight have this kind of code.

I also noticed that this code is generated when I paste my article directly from Notepad to the "Visual" editor in Wordpress. All sorts of code errors and things going haywire. When I paste in the HTML editor in Wordpress, things appear fine.

So could this horrendous code which essentially makes my sites not rank at all? If so, has anybody else had this issue?

[Brent_W]

Are you copy/pasting out of Word/Open Office/etc?

I get this a lot when I've copied text out of Open Office directly into the visual editor instead of copy/pasting it as text.

[LookItsMeTerryG]

That's not the reason you're having issues. Scan your generated page code and think long and hard about the types of backlinks you've been building.

[sashas]

Originally Posted by LookItsMeTerryG

That's not the reason you're having issues. Scan your generated page code and think long and hard about the types of backlinks you've been building.

eZineArticles, GoArticles, Squidoo, and one PR 5 website of mine (link in the blog roll). This is the reason why I'm so surprised because the quality of my links is more than "Google compliant".

Although I confess I don't know too much about it, but don't Search engine spiders have difficulty understanding text if the HTML code is not set up correctly? All those 'overflow', 'hidden' tags have to have some effect.


I get this issue when I copy-paste text from Notepad, which is unformatted text. An interesting thing to note here is that I have to press Ctrl-V (paste) twice if I paste in the "Visual" editor mode. The first time, no text appears at all, just the gibberish code in the HTML editor. The text appears only after I press Ctrl-V a second time.